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fight back when you’re pissing,” Low Key said, low-key as always, in the back of his head.) He took the urinal stall on the left. Then he unzipped his fly and pissed for an age, relaxing, feeling relief. He read the yellowing press clipping framed at eye-level, with a photo of Jack and two alligators.
    There was a polite grunt from the urinal immediately to his right, although he had heard nobody come in.
    The man in the pale suit was bigger standing than he had seemed sitting on the plane beside Shadow. He was almost Shadow’s height, and Shadow was a big man. He was staring ahead of him. He finished pissing, shook off the last few drops, and zipped himself up.
    Then he grinned, like a fox eating shit from a barbed wire fence. “So,” said Mr. Wednesday. “You’ve had time to think, Shadow. Do you want a job?”
    Somewhere in America
L OS A NGELES . 11:26 P.M .
    In a dark red room—the color of the walls is close to that of raw liver—is a tall woman dressed cartoonishly in too-tight silk shorts, her breasts pulled up and pushed forward by the yellow blouse tied beneath them. Her black hair is piled high and knotted on top of her head. Standing beside her is a short man wearing an olive T-shirt and expensive blue jeans. He is holding, in his right hand, a wallet and a Nokia mobile phone with a red, white, and blue face-plate.
    The red room contains a bed, upon which are white satin-style sheets and an ox-blood bedspread. At the foot of the bed is a small wooden table, upon which is a small stone statue of a woman with enormous hips, and a candleholder.
    The woman hands the man a small red candle. “Here,” she says. “Light it.”
    “Me?”
    “Yes,” she says, “if you want to have me.”
    “I shoulda just got you to suck me off in the car.”
    “Perhaps,” she says. “Don’t you want me?” Her hand runs up her body from thigh to breast, a gesture of presentation, as if she were demonstrating a new product.
    Red silk scarves over the lamp in the corner of the room make the light red.
    The man looks at her hungrily, then he takes the candle from her and pushes it into the candleholder. “You got a light?”
    She passes him a book of matches. He tears off a match, lights the wick: it flickers and then burns with a steady flame, which gives the illusion of motion to the faceless statue beside it, all hips and breasts. “Put the money beneath the statue.”
    “Fifty bucks.”
    “Yes.”
    “When I saw you first, on Sunset, I almost thought you were a man.”
    “But I have these,” she says, unknotting the yellow blouse, freeing her breasts.
    “So do a lot of guys, these days.”
    She stretches and smiles. “Yes,” she says. “Now, come love me.”
    He unbuttons his blue jeans, and removes his olive T-shirt. She massages his white shoulders with her brown fingers; then she turns him over, and begins to make love to him with her hands, and her fingers, and her tongue.
    It seems to him that the lights in the red room have been dimmed, and the sole illumination comes from the candle, which burns with a bright flame.
    “What’s your name?” he asks her.
    “Bilquis,” she tells him, raising her head. “With a Q.”
    “A what?”
    “Never mind.”
    He is gasping now. “Let me fuck you,” he says. “I have to fuck you.”
    “Okay, hon,” she says. “We’ll do it. But will you do something for me, while you’re doing it?”
    “Hey,” he says, suddenly tetchy, “ I’m paying you, you know.”
    She straddles him, in one smooth movement, whispering, “I know, honey, I know, you’re paying me, and I mean, look at you, I should be paying you, I’m so lucky…”
    He purses his lips, trying to show that her hooker talk is having no effect on him, he can’t be taken; that she’s a street whore for Chrissakes, while he’s practically a producer, and he knows all about last-minute rip-offs, but she doesn’t ask for money. Instead she says, “Honey, while you’re giving it to me, while